The Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe is a historical-critical edition.

It is an historical edition in that all the various extant versions of each work, including drafts, are being documented, thus depicting the evolution of each individual work, while at the same time presenting their chronology both within Webern’s own biography and within the general context of music history.
It is a critical edition in that it compares and critically examines all available source material.
It is a complete edition in that the entirety of Webern’s surviving compositions, including fragments, are documented and edited.
It is a complete edition because any editing process necessarily involves interpreting the given material, an interpretation which varies according to the use or purpose for which it is intended.

The diverse interests of those potentially consulting the AWG have been taken into account by conceptually dividing it into three different forms of edition (work edition, text edition and sketch edition).

Accessibility is enabled through a hybrid approach: on the one hand via printed volumes (print edition) from the Universal Edition in Vienna and on the other hand via sheet music and material in digital form (online edition), to which links on this website provide open access.


Excerpt of an exemplary prototype of an AWG Online Edition.